Published by Douglas Messerli, the World Cinema Review features full-length reviews on film from the beginning of the industry to the present day, but the primary focus is on films of intelligence and cinematic quality, with an eye to exposing its readers to the best works in international film history.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Bolwieser (The Stationmaster's Wife)

Filmed
shortly before one of Fassbinder’s very greatest films, In a Year with 13 Moons, his 3 ½

hour 1977 television film, Bolwieser (The Stationmaster’s Wife) pared down to about 2 hours in the DVD
version I saw the other day, may appear to be a much-more contained soap-opera
given his next film’s almost hysterical comic and tragic scenes. Many critics,
in fact, have described this work as a kind of provincial Madame Bovary.

Certainly Hani Bolwieser (Elisabeth
Trissenaar), married to the local stationmaster, Bolwieser (Kurt Raab)—a man
she, herself, enduringly calls “Chubby,” despite his assertions that he is not
“that fat”—is a woman easily swayed in matters of the heart. Although she
appears to actually love her husband, and certainly has intense sex with him,
she is also in love with the handsome village butcher, Frank Merkel (Bernhard
Helfich), with whom she has not only regular sexual liaisons but, with her
husband’s approval, to whom she provides a loan so that Merkel might buy and
improve a local restaurant and dance club. Fortunately, the butcher is better
as a businessman than he even is as a lover, and the Bolwiesers begin to see a
healthy profit from the interest of their loan. Bolwieser, since he has
interest in the club, is encouraged to visit the club at nights, but he clearly
would rather stay home with his wife to engage in sex.

One quick perceives that the stationmaster
is so obsessed with his wife that he is utterly impervious to the local gossips
who whisper among themselves about his wife’s affairs. When, at a funeral wake,
the patrons also “wake” him up to the truth, Bolwieser finally confronts his
wife, who pretends such an intense innocence that her husband has no choice but
to believe her; and ultimately she and
Merkel join together to sue the gossips and win, despite the fact that
Bolwieser himself stumbles over his own testimony, the fact of which later
brings his downfall.

Yet Hani is off to get a new hairdo, and
begin yet another affair with the hairdresser, Schafftaller (Udo Kier), an even
more handsome man, but one who might remind inveterate filmgoers of the clothes
designer, Alberto Beddini (Erik Rhodes) in the Fred Astaire film Top Hat, a man more in love with himself
(and, consequently, his own kind) than with the woman he is courting. In the
small town of Werberg, unfortunately, which by the end of the movie we perceive
is being infiltrated by Nazi supporters (including Bolwieser’s two incompetent
employees at the station), that Weimer-like behavior is intolerable. And, when
finally, Hani determines to overthrow her passionate marriage with her
infatuated husband for the slightly more sophisticated charms of her
hairdresser lover, Bolwieser has no choice to admit his wife’s behavior and
refute his own past testimony, which, after a short, dramatic court drama,
sends him to jail.

The cuckolded stationmaster simply
accepts his fate, as the slightly, but only slightly sorrowful Hani moves on to
the rest of her empty life.

It is easy to characterize Hani as a
whore, a woman without any loyalty to her husband and an open liar who destroys
her men. But Fassbinder also shows us, quite clearly, her own torture by these
men, who all claim her as their property, describing her body itself as
evidence of their conquest. At least the slightly effeminate Schafftaller
tempts her with a different lifestyle and a way out of the Werberg “empire”
which, in the director’s metaphor, represents the future Nazi control of the
German heartland. We can imagine, surely, that as much as she may try to escape
the male-controlled world of the Nazi nightmare beginning to close in upon her,
she will be unable to succeed.

At least, Bolweiser, representing another
version of Fassbinder’s memorable character Franz Biberkopf of his 1980
television series, Berlin Alexanderplatz,
may survive simply because of his mental incompetence. Yet like Biberkopf, the
naïve Bolwieser will obviously fare no better in the Third Reich. If nothing
else, Hani may become a high class whore which might, at least, connect her with
the people to help her get through the war—or utterly destroy her in the
process.

In the end, it appears, Fassbinder’s
melodrama is simply another extension of his central concerns. How does one
survive in a world determined to destroy and outlaw different forms of morality
and perceptions of love that lie outside of what is described as the norm. The
next step in this exploration was quite naturally to question the boundaries of
what even a body was, and who might possibly define and control it: issues very
much at the center of In a Year with 13
Moons. And, looking back on this film now, we can recognize its importance
in Fassbinder’s amazingly productive career. I have not yet encountered,
despite the equivocations of other critics, a film by this director that I
could dismiss. And The Stationmaster’s
Wife is clearly an important work.